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They finish their sentence Your face absorbs Your face reacts Then, and only then, you answer
For most charisma, but especially kindness charisma, it’s critical to make others feel good about themselves.
Stop. Absorb the compliment. Enjoy it if you can. Let that second of absorption show on your face. Show the person that they’ve had an impact. Thank them. Saying “Thank you very much” is enough, but you can take it a step further by thanking them for their thoughtfulness or telling them that they’ve made your day.
“You can make more friends in two months by becoming truly interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
Whenever you can, choose to speak in pictures. You’ll have a much greater impact,
When you craft your images and metaphors, try to make them sensory-rich: involve as many of the five senses as possible.
When you tell someone, “No problem,” “Don’t worry,” or “Don’t hesitate to call,” for example, there’s a chance their brain will remember “problem,” “worry,” or “hesitate” instead of your desire to support them.
Entertainment: Make your e-mail or meeting enjoyable. Information: Give interesting or informative content that they can use. Good feelings: Find ways to make them feel important or good about themselves.
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The longer you speak, the higher the price you’re making them pay, so the higher the value ought to be.
When you speak or write, use few words and lots of pictures, and strive to make your communications useful, enjoyable, and even entertaining.
People associate you with the feelings you produce in them. Avoid creating negative associations: don’t make them feel bad or wrong. Make people feel good, especially about themselves. Don’t try to impress them—let them impress you, and they will love you for it.
Business guru Alan Weiss likes to say, “Logic makes people think. Emotion makes them act.”
When our verbal and nonverbal signals are in congruence (when they “agree” with each other), the nonverbal amplifies the verbal. When they conflict, we tend to trust the nonverbal over the verbal. If your body language is anticharismatic, it doesn’t matter how great your message is. On the other hand, with the right body language you can succeed even with an imperfect message.
The potency of your emotional contagion is one good measure of your level of charisma.
Imitating someone’s body language is an easy way to establish trust and rapport. This technique, which is often called mirroring or mimicking, is the conscious application of something that many charismatic people do instinctively.
Mirroring is also one of the few techniques that can help overcome a bad first impression.
Mirror-then-lead is a smart strategy when the person you’re interacting with needs reassurance—when they’re feeling nervous or timid, anxious or awkward, stiff or withdrawn. With any of these emotional states, mirror them to establish comfort and rapport, and then gradually draw them out. In these situations, it’s not a good idea to try to influence their body language too forcefully.
Remember, our physiology affects our psychology. This link between physiology and psychology is also the reason it’s so important to get someone who is in an angry, stubborn, or defensive posture to change their body language before you attempt to change their mind.
When people are sitting across from each other with a table dividing them, they tend to speak in shorter sentences, are more likely to argue, and can recall less of what was said. 8
The next time you want to establish warm rapport with someone, avoid a confrontational seating arrangement and instead sit either next to or at a 90-degree angle from them. These are the positions in which we feel most comfortable. In fact, this is an exercise you can try out with a partner. ♦ Start a conversation sitting next to each other. ♦ After five minutes, change positions so that you’re sitting across from each other. You’ll likely feel a clear difference in comfort level. ♦ After another five minutes, move to a 90-degree angle and feel the difference. ♦ Finally, come back to your
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Anthropologist Helen Fisher explains that when you stare with intensity at someone, it can speed up their heart rate and send a hormone called phenylethylamine, or PEA, coursing through their bloodstream. PEA is the same hormone that produces the phenomenon we call love at first sight.
Few things impair charisma more than bad eye contact and few things gain you charisma points more than improving your eye contact.
“Powerful people sit sideways on chairs, drape their arms over the back, or appropriate two chairs by placing an arm across the back of an adjacent chair. They put their feet on the desk. They sit on the desk.” All of these behaviors, she says, are ways of claiming space.
Your job is to learn how to take up space and get comfortable doing so.
When you want to increase your poise, there are three major issues to look out for. The first is excessive or rapid nodding. Nodding once for emphasis or to express agreement is fine and can be an effective communication method, but nodding three or four times in rapid succession is not.
The second hindrance is excessive verbal reassurance: making a sound, such as “uh-huh,” or a half-sentence, such as “Oh, I agree.” Done once, and consciously, this is fine; multiple times per sentence is not. The third issue is restlessness or fidgeting (tapping your pencil or foot, or rearranging items on the table). Fidgeting decreases presence, thus charisma. Even when you have warmth, confidence, and are mentally present, if you are physically restless, you can’t be charismatic.
Catch yourself when you find yourself nodding or verbally reassuring, and try to replace it with stillness and silence. Aim to get comfortable with silence, inserting pauses between your sentences or even midsentence. If you want to speed up the process, ask a friend or colleague to tell you whenever they catch you nodding or reassuring.
You could indeed ask your opponents for their help or ask them for a favor. Better still, ask them for something they can give without incurring any cost: their opinion. Asking for someone’s opinion is a better strategy than asking for their advice,
in the case of praise, Carnegie’s writings are just as applicable today. He writes: “We all crave honest appreciation. It’s a gnawing and unfaltering human hunger; and the rare individual who satisfies it will hold people in the palm of his hand.”
When you show people how they’ve impacted you, they feel that they’ve in a sense made you. This sense of ownership gives them a vested interest, and they identify with you; you become part of their identity. Therefore, they feel more responsibility for ensuring your success.
You can take a similar path by saying: “You know, I might not be explaining this the right way. Let me try again.”
Just coming into a conversation with the mindset of “Help me understand how you see things” can change the outcome completely.
When consulting to large firms I often recommend that they go through their marketing materials (you can do the same with your e-mails) using two different-colored highlighters, one for things relating to them and the other for sentences that speak to their potential clients. If the second color doesn’t predominate, they have a problem.
You, too, will often be communicating with attention-starved audiences who will devote only part of their attention to what you are saying. If you can keep this one fact firmly in mind while you craft your presentation, and design your speech accordingly, you’ll be more effective than 80 percent of the speakers out there.
Select the single most important idea you want to convey and make it as crystal clear and easy to understand as you possibly can. Ideally, you should be able to articulate your message in one sentence. Within this one main message, have three to five key supporting points. The human brain thinks in triads (from Olympic medals to fairy tales, it’s three medals, three princes, three bears), and it cannot immediately comprehend numbers greater than four.
Stories have a particularly strong impact on people. In fact, audiences will often remember first the story, and only second the point the story was making.
When you’re delivering a presentation, you’re in the entertainment business, whether you know it or not.
Make even numbers and statistics personal, meaningful, and relatable for your audience. Steve Jobs did this masterfully when he gave his audience two ways of measuring iPhone sales: “Apple sold four million iPhones so far,” he said. “That amounts to selling twenty thousand iPhones every single day.”
When you craft the closing of your presentation, keep in mind that we remember primarily beginnings and endings. Just as you want to start on a high note, you also want to end on a high note, so avoid ending with Q&A. It’s hard to have a question-and-answer period as compelling and energetic as your main speech. Almost inevitably, the Q&A period lowers the energy.
It’s all about them. Use the word you as often as possible. Use their words, their stories, their metaphors:
Red conveys energy, passion. Wear red to wake up an audience. Black shows you’re serious and that you won’t take no for an answer. White exudes honesty and innocence, which is why defendants often choose it in the courtroom. Blue emits trust. The darker the shade, the deeper the level of trust it elicits. Gray is a good neutral, the quintessential color of business. Orange and yellow are not recommended. Because they are the first to attract the human eye, they are also the first to tire it.
(perhaps because pearls seem conservative, they have been shown to further enhance credibility).
When you know that a particular presentation will have a significant impact on your career, it’s worth rehearsing until you feel that it’s part of your very bones.
To make your audience feel particularly special, speak as if you were sharing a secret.
Another way to make people feel special as you roam about the stage is to give one to two seconds of eye contact per person. Though this may sound like a short amount of time, I promise that in the midst of a speech it feels like an eternity.
It’s really worth paying attention to your tempo because the slower you speak, the more thoughtful and deliberate you will sound, and the more attention people will give to what you say.
After delivering a key point or an impactful story, pause for a few seconds
Pausing is equally critical to end your presentations. Don’t run off stage.
If you’re having trouble pausing, try color-coding your speeches. I used this technique for years when I first started out. I would use one blue bar for a one-beat pause, two red bars for a two-beat pause
Sometimes, simply assigning to people the labels you want them to live up to is enough.
